I hate how knowledge matters less than social standing. I could read ten programming books and work hard at improving myself as a programmer but it wouldn't ever matter. The only thing that matters is the heirarchy on the team. Plus it's a pyramid. Fight it out at the bottom until a hand reaches down to you from above and pulls you into a senior dev or management position. No thanks. I hated having some other person tell me what my skill level and self worth were. I know my skill level and self worth and rarely as a developer did I ever get to live up to my potential because either I was in a feature factory or I was on a project with constraints that forced me to write terrible code. I hated looking through other people's god awful code and being judged because I had a hard time understanding it. Like they always measured and judged me with the wrong metrics. I hated going into meetings and being an expert (or at least best in the room) on some topic and having other people not listen to me. I hated not being listened to when I was trying to improve code or feature quality. I hated code reviews where the only point was to make the reviewer feel like he'd accomplished something by forcing me to make some inconsequential change. I hated the little bs politics people play about what comes back as a bug. I hated not being respected as a human but just being the stupid programmer who turns all of our genius ideas into reality. I hated not being able to use my own brain eight hours a day because I was renting it to someone else. I hated two hours a day in rush hour traffic. I hated sitting inside in a dead quiet room on a beautiful day. Perhaps more than anything I just hated working in a terrible code base.
If you wait until you're financially ready you might be missing out. Part of dropping the golden handcuffs for me was living with less. I wasn't living sustainability anyways and it was better I dealt with it before I got too old and found myself unable to deal with the change.
If you wait until you're financially ready you might be missing out. Part of dropping the golden handcuffs for me was living with less. I wasn't living sustainability anyways and it was better I dealt with it before I got too old and found myself unable to deal with the change.
Good luck!